Photographing the Urban

Thursday, 2 July 2015

“Artificial Beauty” is composed of eight black and white photographs. These
images represent the abundance of makeup products I noticed when coming to
Stirling in comparison to where I am from.

My work is influenced by Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), particularly his
photograph The Staircase, which
features intense diagonals and cropping that is unusual compared to what I’ve
learned in traditional photography classes. I was also inspired by Alma
Lavenson (1897-1989), who shot ambiguous photos of herself, showing an unclear
perception of who she really was. This is why I chose to show hands holding
lipstick and part of a face cropped and reflected into a mirror in my images,
because these body parts didn’t portray the identity of a specific person. I
chose the topic of makeup specifically because I feel as though it is heavily
emphasized in the UK. The malls where I’m from and where I go to university in
America both don’t have any makeup stores, yet Stirling’s, which is a smaller
town, has at least two. A large portion of the University of Stirling’s
pharmacy is dedicated to makeup, the mouse pads in the 24/7 lab feature a brand
of concealer, and in the bigger cities, huge displays of models are featured in
many shop windows. Early modernist photographers used social issues as subject
matter, and I feel that my using the excessive abundance of makeup as a topic
shines a light on consumerism, and a desire to purchase products completely
unnecessary for human survival or improving the quality of life.

"Artifical Beauty” tells a story of a girl going to the store, becoming
overwhelmed by the selection of makeup, finally picking some out and buying it,
putting it on, and then what little remains of it at the end of the day. The
use of intense angles in the first half of the series symbolizes the chaos of
being faced with so many choices. The alternation of the direction of the
angles from one image to another creates successful flow. By using mirrors and
windows for the last portion of my series, I managed to capture tools for the
application and removal of makeup in completely natural lighting. I chose to
use a black and white colour scheme for the series not only to pay homage to
original modernist photography, but also to show that although in real life the
multitude of colours that makeup is available in are visually appealing, the
display and concept becomes significantly less exciting when that element is
removed.

Although the concept of makeup is trivial in comparison, I was inspired by El
Lissitzky’s (1890-1941) ability to use photography to promote soviet patriotism
in a positive light and convey equality among men and women. Some viewers may
not understand my series, but I hope that the lengths that some women go
through in order to feel confident, or even acceptable, are portrayed and that
society’s misconceptions about beauty are thought about critically by viewers.

Inspired by the bold statements modernist photographers could convey with simple
images, I have attempted to present a strong message to my viewers. Society
should be ashamed for tricking girls into thinking they aren’t pretty enough
for monetary gain, and consumers should also be upset for buying into it for so
long. I would like to inspire people to reconsider spending money on huge quantities
of designer makeup because at the end of the day, all you are left with are a
few smudges on a cotton pad headed for the trash.

Tuesday, 30 June 2015

-Paul Strand (1890-1976) was a pictorialist until visiting a
gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz criticized the graphic softness of
his work which inspired Strand to completely change his style and direction. “straight
up” documentary style, believing that the use of technology, especially the
camera, could improve humankind.

- Blind is a blind
lady in NYC. Strand would put a fake lens on his camera and really photograph
the subject with a lens hidden under his arm. Documented photography but kept
the clean aesthetics of modernism.

-Wall Street has no focal point and seems
abstract, ugly at the time. Straight shot of workers going about their day.
Overall he wanted to use modern art to show the humanity seen in western
artistic traditions.

-Lissitzky’s work spoke for the prevailing political
discourse of his native Russia, and Soviet Union.

-Used color and basic shapes to make strong political
statements.

-USSR Russische
Ausstellung (1929). To show the equality of men and women.

-The
Runner (1930) Split into vertical sections to symbolize movement. Visual
fragmentation when one looks at the parts rather than the whole.

-The Staircase (1930) Alexander Rodchenko- used unusual
angles and perspective. Woman with a child placed among the manmade enviromnet.
Off kilter angle of the stairs and her shadow is cropped partway out of the
photo. Random dark portions of the environment in 3 out of 4 of the corners.

-Compositions such as this were an
important influence on New Vision, the modernist photography movement that
gripped Europe in the 1920s and '30s.

-Lavenson was another pictorialist turned modernist, due to
critiques from Edward Weston. She emphasized formal qualities of architecture,
machinery, and still lifes.

-inspired by the idea of light on metal and the way it would
gleam in the sunshine.

-Joined f/64 photo club in 1932, produced stark depictions
of nature in the American west. The group was about conformity and presented a
unified way about what the new modernist approach for art should be.

Monday, 29 June 2015

Pictorialism emerged as a style of photography in the 1910s and was
considered the first photographic movement. Artists were trying to prove that photography
could be an art form and not just used for documenting portraits, families, or
scientific concepts as it had mainly done in the past. The pictorialism
movement was building off of the impressionist painting movement of the
1860s-1880s and it displayed that the fog, low light situations, mist, and
strong contrast between lights and darks of impressionism could be accomplished
through photography as well (Borda).

Before pictorialism, photography was
seen as pristine and crisp, generally done in studios or with snapshot cameras.
Pictorialist artists such as Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) brought photography into
the real world by using rural people in their homes as subjects.Nature was also commonly photographed by
artists such as John G. Bullock (1871-1933), who especially liked to capture
reflections in water and tree limbs and shadows. The emphasis in pictorialist
images wasn’t the subject though, but rather the mood or emotional impact shown
by the photographs. (Borda).

My pictorialist images were taken
around the Stirling area with a digital pocket camera and handmade filters.
Images 6-8 in my series remind me of Bullock’s work because they are of trees,
bridges, and the reflections they make in the water. Bullock’s Beech Trees near Pebble Beach (fig. 1)
reminds me of my image #7 because trees, water, and hills in the background are
the subject matter in both. In both, the image reflected into the water is
blurrier than what is seen on land. Although the placement of the trees is very
different in the two photographs, I think the overall message is the same. Both
images convey tranquillity and a feeling of being comforted by nature’s
surroundings.

Image #9 in my series was shot on
the Stirling Bridge and the detail in the bricks and how they fade as the eye
travels further back into the photograph reminds me of authentic pictorialist
images from that were using a shallow depth of field to mimic the way lines
blurred together toward the back of some impressionist paintings. Joseph
Kiely’s A Garden of Dreams (fig. 2) is
similar to my #9 because both have water on the left side and a winding
overpass on the right side of the frame. They both feature a blobby, faded look
on the trees, yet sharper detail on the paths. Both photographs also show
subtle differences in the colours of the sky but a strong contrast between the
darkest and lightest tones of the images overall.

Artie Van Blarcum’s Train Station (fig. 3) and my image #2,
shot at Mar’s Wark Ruins, share many similarities. Both images show brick
arches and detailing in the surrounding iron gates and barriers. There is a
strong contrast between the light reflecting off of the higher up bricks and an
ominous darkness happening in the bottom of the frame in both photos as well. Although
my picture uses sunlight and Van Blarcum’s uses artificial lighting, the fact
that the light is coming from the top in both gives the feeling of being in a
confined space and having to look up and rely on the lighting to find a way
around. Compositionally, another similarity is that the highest part of the top
arch barely fits within the top of the frame in both images. Both were shot
with portrait style orientation as well.

One of my favourite images from this
group is my image #3, which was shot at Old Town Cemetery in Stirling at about
6pm. I shot this image from the top of a hill overlooking the cemetery and
placed the grass and lower parts of the cemetery in the bottom third, the
buildings, trees, and majority of the cemetery in the middle third, and the sky
in the top third of the image. The buildings in the background are relatively
in focus in comparison to the graves in the centre of the photo. The graves look
like they are very much alive and moving and remind me of a city scene of
people that would be moving about, captured with a slower shutter speed to make
them blur. Marsh (fig. 4) by Imogen
Cunningham (1883-1976) has a similar aesthetic because the tree branches in the
top of the frame are in focus but the branches and grass in the bottom third
aren’t, and look like they could be blowing in the wind.

Before this assignment, I never knew
what pictorialism was and now that I have practiced on a digital camera, I
think it would be interesting to try and recreate these effects with a film
camera and some adjustments of filters in the darkroom. It was a beautiful time
for photography and unfortunately with the smartphone and digital camera craze of
today, images like these are rare to come by in modern times.

Tuesday, 23 June 2015

Camera obscuras have
existed since ancient times, using a pinhole in a dark room and the filtering in of
light to trace images, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that a
telescopic lens was incorporated into the medium (Greenspun). By the 17th
century, camera obscuras had gained popularity and were used for both
scientific and artistic purposes. An example of a scientific use of the camera
obscura was Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who used the camera obscura to view
the sun and sunspots since these were damaging to stare at directly (Borda).
Camera obscuras were used to accurately map out city scenes, yet also to make
images that portrayed cities as appealing and encouraged people to live there. As
an art purpose, camera obscuras were used to create portraits.

The
famous portrait titled Girl with a Pearl
Earring by Johannes Verneer (1632-1675) was created with a camera obscura (Borda).
It is for this reason that the close up
features of the girl’s face are soft and blurred whereas the creases in her
fabric are more in focus. The camera obscura was unable to simultaneously focus
on every layer of depth of the subject that Verneer was painting. Other
characteristics of paintings done by artists using a camera obscura include
oddly large or small hands, the edges of buildings shrink towards a vanishing
point, or a ring of yellow light in the middle of the image. In landscape
scenes, people were often added in later, since in real life they were moving
too fast for the camera obscura to capture (Borda). Because of this they were
often too large, as seen in Canaletto’s (1697-1768) Venice: the Grand Canal with S. Maria della Salute towards the Riva
degli Schiavoni, where the people are equally as tall as the boats they are
on.

My original camera obscura had many
problems, the most obvious being that the box was too big for my digital
camera. When my digital camera was sitting in the box and took a picture it was
only tall enough to capture the bottom half. Another problem was that the
images in general were very faint. I fixed these problems by making an entirely
new camera obscura, wrapping the outside of the box with tape multiple times to
make it more light tight, and putting a piece of cardboard in the back with a
hole cut out that was the size of my lens so that less light could come in from
the back. The third problem was that the screen wasn’t tight enough. I fixed
this in my new camera obscura by pulling on all sides of the bag before I taped
it down.

Even with these adjustments, there were
still some problems that were unavoidable. All of my images were most focused
in the middle and gradually fanned out to be less focused. This was because the
camera obscura lens was located right in the middle of the frame and wasn’t
large enough to encompass the entire image with the same accuracy. Another
problem was that my screen would get slightly crumpled as I moved the inner
camera obscura box in and out of focus.

The aesthetics my images resemble that
of Canaletto’s city scene paintings. He liked to include people and the
bustling streets in his paintings because this would make a city look thriving
and inviting. My second image includes a large group of people toward the
bottom of the frame and my third image features a few people and cars closer
up. My sixth image has the entirety of the Church of Wellington shown in the
centre of the photo, which reminds me of Canaletto’s
placement of the arch in View of the Arch of Constantine with the Colosseum.